Author Archives: Brian Alvey

Clip-N-Seal Grand Prize Winner Anna Walker of Kissimmee, FL (via www.boingboing.net) Clip-N-Seal Runner-up Prize Winners Ko-Eun Kim of Seattle, WA (via talk.yippa.com) Dave Rutledge of St. Louis, MO (via www.madapeden.com) Nathaniel Bishop of Old Saybrook, CT (via www.lockergnome.com) Jost Lunstroth of Houston, TX (via www.up2speed.com) Congratulations to all ten of our first round of winners. Coming soon: new Blogstakes contestsContinue reading “In the fresh”

This afternoon, 16 messages went out to people to verify contact information and confirm eligibility. Once I have their responses, I’ll contact their referring blogs and our sponsors can start awarding prizes. In the meantime, work continues on the new A List Apart site and my publishing company Weblogs, Inc. Plus Niki and I are glued to theContinue reading “You may have already won”

This week saw the end of the first Blogstakes contest, the one for Clip-N-Seal. Soon I’ll set up a script that lets Clip-N-Seal randomly pick their winners and notify everyone who participated in the contest if they asked to be notified. Then I’ll delete all of your email addresses. It was no surprise that blog marketingContinue reading “Zeno of Elea would have loved blog marketing”

Send email to friends — like Richard the great SQL developer — who were in the buildings two years ago and made it out. Accentuate the positive: When recalling those events, focus on the good that came in the weeks following the 11th. Remember how Jason opened our office in the city to several displacedContinue reading “A September 11th To Do List”

I found out where some of those people from 1994 ended up. You remember the ones that believed any commercial use of the Internet — like banner ads or putting your magazine online and charging money for people to read it — is a corruption of their pure medium? They have blogs now. But whatContinue reading “All blog marketers are going to hell”

About 24 hours ago, Blogstakes was unleashed and it’s moving pretty quickly. I’ve been interviewed on Up2Speed and Boing Boing and the mail I’ve received from bloggers and interested contest sponsors has been incredible. Thank you for your warm response! Now back to our regularly-scheduled development work.

Blogstakes is a unique new kind of sweepstakes with two winners for every prize: a person who entered and the site that referred the winning entry. So if the prize is a truck, then the winning entry gets a truck and the blog that sent them gets a truck too. Blogstakes opens today with two contests. One of them — FreeContinue reading “Let’s do launch”

Everyone I work with is home from work today and many of them are still without electricity or running water. Since my electricity was on and my server in the city had not yet reappeared, I tinkered with some SQL code for my next version of Meet The Makers and I braved the shopping throngContinue reading “A snow day in the middle of summer”

Maybe you’ve heard a story like this one: I was in a chat session with co-workers in LA and NYC and I was knocked offline when the power died at my home office in White Plains. Before I could call anyone to explain my sudden disappearance, they called to tell me that their whole buildingContinue reading “Powerless”

Today I tested the Blogstakes site in BrowserCam. Blogstakes looked great in every modern browser and failed spectacularly in a few older ones — but it looks way better in Linux browsers than I imagined it would. So I’ll be hiding styles from the older browsers. This is one of two site designs that I’m workingContinue reading “No thanks, I’m just browsing”